The Cinesexualhttps://thecinesexual.com
gay movie reviews & moreTue, 13 Feb 2018 13:01:54 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4131549299film note: Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustinhttps://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-brother-outsider-the-life-of-bayard-rustin/
https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-brother-outsider-the-life-of-bayard-rustin/#respondTue, 13 Feb 2018 12:59:29 +0000https://thecinesexual.com/?p=4922I already knew that Rustin taught Martin Luther King about non-violence and that he was the principal organizer of the first March on Washington. What I'm happy to be reminded of, as to the latter, was that he did it on 3x5 cards in his back pocket, before computers, before the Internet. He was also a talented singer — a crooner, even — and a prolific essay writer.

film note: Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin

It took me forever but I finally snagged a copy of this essential PBS documentary about the civil rights organizer, Bayard Rustin, and it’s uplifted me in ways that the overrated garbage getting touted for Oscars never could.

I already knew that Rustin taught Martin Luther King about non-violence and that he was the principal organizer of the first March on Washington. What I’m happy to be reminded of, as to the latter, was that he did it on 3x5 cards in his back pocket, before computers, before the Internet. He was also a talented singer — a crooner, even — and a prolific essay writer. I’m not surprised to discover the ontological significance of his statement during the first LGBT March On Washington that gay rights had become the barometer for whether or not a country or a people or an organization were serious about human rights in general. Rustin was an unashamed, out black gay man, a Quaker and a pacifist in the 40s. He was a singular individual. And he debated Malcolm X to a standstill. It’s no small triumph that Malcolm became more like Rustin before he was assassinated. All of that provides material for this documentary.

But only 9 people on Letterboxd have seen this film (Update: the number now stands at 60), the only feature length documentary about one of the most important American activists in history. It took me FOREVER to torrent it. It seemed no one wanted to see it.

Why is that?

This film doesn’t go far enough in exploring the reasons but it is suggestive and it goes far beyond the fact that he was unapologetically gay. My feeling is that Bayard Rustin was one of those few humans whose morality and personhood was beholden only to himself, that no single movement or organization could contain what he wanted to be and do in his life. Few understood him although many felt his influence and relied on his passion. He proved that, whatever your impact in the world, you have to make choices to become a celebrity, and he apparently didn’t want that.

One of my favorite archival shots in the film is Rustin walking behind Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performing at the March on Washington. Baez has lost her place in the song. Dylan’s eyes are on the lyrics in front of him. Rustin is striding behind them, smoking a cigarette, with a satisfied grin on his face as he watches the crowd respond.

Amiri Baraka called him a pervert and an accomplice of slavers. Richard Nixon and the FBI considered him an enemy of the state.

He’s my kind of hero.

Note: Since I posted this on Letterboxd in 2014, with no likes, Brother Outsider has become available on DVD.

]]>https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-brother-outsider-the-life-of-bayard-rustin/feed/04922film reaction: Compliancehttps://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-reaction-compliance/
https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-reaction-compliance/#respondTue, 06 Feb 2018 10:09:23 +0000https://thecinesexual.com/?p=4912This is no Land Without Bread, but it's still a pretty effective skewering of bourgeois morality.

film reaction: Compliance

This is no Land Without Bread, but it’s still a pretty effective skewering of bourgeois morality.

I did some cursory research on the incident that “inspired” this film, incredulous that such a thing could possibly happen — a man claiming to be a police officer convinces a fast food manager to strip search an employee looking for evidence of theft; this eventually leads to a sexual assault. Apparently, it did happen, as did several other similar incidents with a similar MO. (A man was tried and acquitted for some of these crimes. That sounds like the real story.)

For the most part, the film follows the broad outline of what was reported to have happened and hits all the major events of one particular incident at a McDonald’s, including the rape. How Compliance depicts this strip-search scam has pissed a few people off, including during the Q&A after the film premiered at Sundance, and including someone on Letterboxd in a fairly apoplectic review, calling some aspects of the film “inappropriate,” “wrong-headed,” “perverse” and “bullshit.” Whew.

I found the overall tone of the film to be rather cool and restrained, and shot resourcefully. Nearly every shot uses selective focus, making the interior of the ChickWich feel bigger than it is, but I never really got a clear map of anything behind the counter and cashier. The still lifes, in particular, and the single-shot macro work combined with rack focusing beautifully established a sense of place and mood, making strange a quotidian location. The previously mentioned Danny Baldwin seems to think that using one’s filmmaking chops to tell a story is reason enough to hate this movie or suspect its motives. (Kathryn Bigelow gets a pass for Zero Dark Thirty, presumably because she won an Oscar.)

Compliance doesn’t so much have an undercurrent of class condescension, as it would have if this were a Coen brothers movie, but it does try very hard to manipulate the audience’s expectations. The characters in this film say and do absurd things, but still I think the degree to which you laugh at this movie or find the characters’ behavior funny rather than unsettling, reflects more on your own class allegiances than on the filmmakers’, or on your own feeling of superiority that it couldn’t happen to you. If you laugh, you’ve been caught out. If you get angry, you’re in denial. Compliance tweaks the liberal biases of certain audience members by provoking the denialists pretty effectively.

But ultimately, the film critiques and reveals a system of control, and the weak-minded people who are entrapped by it. And sorry, I’m going to dismiss out of hand any objections to showing the victim topless as being misogynist or exploitive. The shooting style employed goes out of its way to avoid prurience. During the first shot of Rebecca interrogated without her top, the camera ducks behind a shelving unit almost as if embarrassed, and I just don’t know how much more careful the forced oral sex scene could have been shot and edited without being indecipherable.

The manager Sandra, who is almost immediately convinced of the authority of the crank caller, is played by a very resourceful, composed and committed Ann Dowd. There are a couple attempts to make this character into a pathetic figure, or at least as one isolated from the realities of her employees’ lives, and in this the film is less assured and convincing. However, based on my own experience with low-paid managers, the self-aggrandizement and the brand loyalty seem like shrewd observations to me, if not unique ones. The film ends with a news interview with Sandra as she tries to explain her actions. The interviewer asks her if she’s a victim, too, and she eagerly agrees. The ways that she is and the ways that she’s not are the very interesting moral questions that this film raises.

Note: I realized as I was reposting this that in my initial response to Compliance I left out any examination of the parts of the movie I didn’t like. In particular, when the actual perpetrator of the prank appears on screen, the tone of film seems glib and sarcastic, too closely reflecting this man’s mood, rather than cool and satirical. This is a major flaw, in my mind, but it doesn’t take away completely the power of the events shows in the Chickwich and their implications for life outside of it.

]]>https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-reaction-compliance/feed/04912film review: Adore aka Adoration aka Two Mothershttps://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-review-adore/
https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-review-adore/#respondMon, 05 Feb 2018 14:38:12 +0000https://thecinesexual.com/?p=4897Adore is a pretty and mildly titillating drama about two lifelong friends, Roz and Lil, who enter into sexual relationships with each other's sons, with the sons as proxies for their sublimated desires for one another. Actually, I don't know about that, but it sounds fun.

film note: Adore

Someone somewhere said this was melodrama. I think they should go back and watch Imitation of Life.

What this is, is a pretty and mildly titillating sexual drama focusing on two lifelong — and it must be said, because no one else will, very well-off — best friends who end up fucking each other’s sons.

It also struck me as very gay (and that’s the same thing as melodrama for some straight people) in that, not only does the film go out of its way to show the boys as Shirtless Young Gods In the Surf, while carefully avoiding stating their ages, but it’s strongly suggested that the two women are using the boys as proxies for fucking each other (and for holding on to their youth). Cept, they’re not lezos! (Apparently that word is still common in Australia?)

The real betrayal comes, after all, when one of the women, Lil, sneaks around with Tom, without telling Roz or I’ll-never-forgive-you-for-this Ian, after they’d all agreed to stop. It’s all four or nothing for these folks, which they hold up as a deeply personal and group-held morality. There are obsessions here, intermixed with transgressive sexual mores, but the tone of the movie never managed to compel me to take it seriously. Some real melodrama might have helped the lack of conviction.

Compare the simmering hysteria accompanying these depictions of adult women fucking “underage” boys (underage in Australia, I guess, not in most of Europe) in this movie (and something reactionary like the art film, The Teacher) with the complete acceptance of the relationship between an older man and younger man in Call Me By Your Name, and you see how far we’ve come. Or if you’re James Woods, how far we’ve fallen. Of course, boys in films like these are always on the cusp of manhood, usually 17, so that our panties won’t be quite so twisted.

I haven’t read the book, but the film seems hampered by the form of its source, and strains within 90 minutes to hit the character beats and life-events that are supposed to create what might be rich characters in some other work of art. It doesn’t, quite, but I wasn’t bored.

Side note: Xavier Samuel, who played Ian in Adore, was also in a gay-themed short called Drowning, contained in the omnibus, Boys on Film 6: Pacific Rim. The compilation itself is one of the weakest in the series, but Drowning is not bad.

]]>https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-review-adore/feed/04897film note: Deliverancehttps://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-deliverance/
https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-deliverance/#respondSun, 04 Feb 2018 00:14:09 +0000https://thecinesexual.com/?p=4888This pastoral gothic survival thriller has lost a lot of its power since 1972, because of the parodies and the horror sub-genre it spawned, and well, because it's so obviously an emasculation fantasy. The action sequences are the least successful to watch twenty years after the first time I saw it, but it's still creepy and weird and beautiful.

film note: Deliverance

This pastoral gothic survival thriller has lost a lot of its power since 1972, because of the parodies and the horror sub-genre it spawned, and well, because it’s so obviously an emasculation fantasy. The action sequences are the least successful to watch twenty years after the first time I saw it, but it’s still creepy and weird and beautiful.

It’s also cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s best and most suggestive work, with its forest-after-the-rain color palette and widescreen riverscape compositions and especially an understanding of the power of close-ups — that sheriff leaning into the car during the film’s last five minutes and clicking his back-teeth. I would have loved to watch Zsigmond shoot the confrontation between Jon Voight and the Toothless Man that takes place on a cliff over the river. The setup (It’s just after the credits: a 2-minute 14-second wide shot consisting of a static shot, a pan and a quick dolly back, encompassing all the characters, their personalities and how like arrogant fish-out-of-water they are.) and wind-down sequences really are my favorites, particularly the taxi ride through the soon-to-be-underwater town, as they follow a Church of Christ on wheels. Amazing.

Having said that, both he and director John Boorman seem a little clueless about the flaming subtext in James Dickey’s book, or maybe they weren’t because the script removes most of it, and almost all of the envy/admiration and macho tension between the 4 friends who take the canoe trip is gone, too. All that’s left is Burt Reynolds’ biceps, hairy chest and forearms and Voight’s pretty, suffering face. And lips, remember?

Oh, and that rape scene. Ned Beatty with his ass up in the air, facedown in the leaves and his underwear around his ankles — who could forget that?

]]>https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-deliverance/feed/04888film note: O Fantasmahttps://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-o-fantasma/
https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-o-fantasma/#respondFri, 02 Feb 2018 10:00:50 +0000https://thecinesexual.com/?p=4875This kinky & wicked wet dream within a BDSM fantasy doesn't have much of a plot but it pulled me along easily with one hilarious erotic vignette after another as a cute, brazenly horny young garbageman in Lisbon tests his limits and the limits of others on the streets and in the toilets.

film note: O Fantasma

This kinky & wicked wet dream within a BDSM fantasy within a comic book doesn’t have much of a plot but it pulled me along easily with one hilarious erotic vignette after another as a cute, brazenly horny young garbageman in Lisbon stalks some hairy dude, gets fucked by his boss (probably faked), licks a lot of stuff, seduces his female fellow worker, gets a blow job from a man in a public toilet (real), jacks off a cop who for some reason is tied up in the back of a car (mostly real), drinks water from a muddy puddle, etc. Dogs and doglike behavior are common motifs but one of the things the film made me think about is, What exactly is simulated sex in this context?

The black latex catsuit recalls Irma Vep but the way the director uses his fully committed lead reminded me of the paces that underground filmmakers put their stars through, such as John Waters getting Divine to eat shit in Pink Flamingos, and Todd Verow directing Philly to lick urinals in public toilets in Berlin. Ricardo Meneses as Sérgio inhabits his obsessed character with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness and not a trace of a smirk, which makes it all the funnier, of course. Having mentioned those directors, I will say that the tone is more dry, more European than that of either of those Americans.

I’m probably over-rating this a bit because Meneses is pretty much just-my-type and because I believe in documenting one’s obsessions, but whatever. Despite the extremes of behavior, this isn’t sex-negative and that’s a relief after the praise heaped recently on the reactionary Stranger By the Lake.

film note: Bridegroom

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make distinctions between tragedies, and between works of art, when the the most valued ethical characteristic of our YouTube-era selves is boundless narcissism. In other words, getting yours and anyone else’s suffering noticed and attended to depends on how good one is at marketing. Young Shane Bitney Crone’s YouTube video, It Could Happen To You, had already proved his and the issue’s staying power. They had the eyeballs.

So it was with a mixture of distaste and yes, the requisite outrage that I watched this documentary about a young gay man who is denied access to his lover’s funeral by the parents. The film is divided up between talking heads testifying as to the closeness and adorableness of the couple and an endless sea of selfies and candids, the repetition and sameness of which constitutes a large part of how this film gets its job done.

Of course it’s an injustice. Of course if the couple had been able to get married then that final cruelty would have been impossible. Of course the homophobic parents are assholes and probably deserve whatever public shaming they’re getting because of this film.

Or do they? They lost a loved, too, and ignoring that is one of the moral choices we must refuse to face in order to make this film work. The film doesn’t allow that to be contemplated even for a second.

I also wonder if anyone would have given a shit if the young men had been fat, ugly nerds with cheap phones.

]]>https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-reaction-bridegroom/feed/04866film note: Saschahttps://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-sascha/
https://thecinesexual.com/gay-movies/film-note-sascha/#respondWed, 31 Jan 2018 11:16:47 +0000https://thecinesexual.com/?p=4855Köln, or Cologne, was one of the gayest places I visited the last time I did a European tour. If you listen to the city's government, which likes to tout the fact, it's gayer than Amsterdam. Located on the Rhine in Germany and being that country's fourth largest city, it's not surprising that it's also full of immigrants looking for better work and a better way of life for their kids.

film note: Sascha

Köln, or Cologne, was one of the gayest places I visited the last time I did a European tour. If you listen to the city’s government, which likes to tout the fact, it’s gayer than Amsterdam. Located on the Rhine in Germany and being that country’s fourth largest city, it’s not surprising that it’s also full of immigrants looking for better work and a better way of life for their kids.

The title character of this coming-out movie is a son in an immigrant family from Montenegro (although it seems they’re Serbo-Croatian). He’s in love with his piano teacher, the older, native German, Gebhard, who is gay but not interested in young Sascha, at least partly because he, Gebhard, is moving to Vienna. Sascha’s brother, Boki, is in love with Sacha’s best friend, Jiao, who’s Chinese but who’s in love with Sascha. Jio’s dad disapproves of her friendship with Sascha (and thinks they are boyfriend/girlfriend) and of her use of mobile phones. All the dads and moms hate that aspect of modern life. So it’s a big mess, generally, with at least three languages being spoken and everyone misunderstanding everyone’s else’s contexts and motivations.

I thought the movie did a good job conveying this very European milieu with a number of visual jokes made in single shots that establish a sense of place, personal and national histories and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow pace of change. For instance, Sascha’s loud, tall authoritarian dad, Vlado, has been working on their bathroom for over a year. His assistant mistakenly installs a bidet in place of a sink. The assistant asks why he’s in such a hurry. The camera tilts up to reveal the pointed arch over the doorway and Vlado explains that the house used to be owned by Turks. The biggest joke, of course, is that Sascha’s parents didn’t have a clue they were living in one of the gay capitals of Europe.

The film maintains its low-key geniality, perhaps expressed best in lead actor Sasa Kekez’s comic faces, for most of its length, until from out of nowhere a gun appears in Vlado’s hands, changing everything. That ruined it for me. Luckily, most of the good stuff had already happened, shot in a dreamy visual style in which the characters speak and move within gauzy clouds of natural light, and sometimes in silhouette. The camera drifts along with them, even during relatively action-less conversations, inviting us to pay attention.

film note: Silent Youth

Two young men meet on a walkway above a Berlin train station and spend the next few days hanging out on the streets trying to figure out what the other one wants, if he wants anything or anyone at all. Director Diemo Kemmesies takes the postponement of same-sex male desire to an almost comic extreme, employing long takes, extended silences, conversations stripped of almost all suggestion or allusion and expressions lacking any affect other than expectant diffidence, until the need to see something, anything consummated becomes excruciating, or excruciatingly boring depending on how invested you are in the scenario.

Once the kissing starts, in a shared shower-scene, the attraction seems obvious — it is one of the most convincing make-out scenes, in close-up, I’ve witnessed in a while, and that’s by no means a given in movies with or about sex — but until that point, it could have gone either way, and I felt a real fear as I watched that it was going to go the other. That’s a rare effect. Things get a little weirder and more complicated as the more confident boy realizes his new fuck buddy is a lot more fucked-up than he realized, and probably a big liar.

This film has the ring of truth for me, perhaps because in my own youth that sense of confusion about and misapprehension of the other person’s desires was a more familiar scenario than falling into bed on first sight was, and it’s the latter, easier-to-show scenarios that get more screen time in gay cinema. For that alone, I think it’s more than worth a look. It might deserve an extra half-star after a second viewing.

Note: This is not a coming-out story, however, thank the gods, as the press blurb misleads. I think one of the boys has a ways to go yet.

film note: Shame

I’d assumed that director Steve McQueen was gay — I’d seen him on the Colbert Report and found him pretty, uh, queeny — so I’d hoped that a film about no-longer-trendy sex addiction by a gay black guy might at least be smart and funny. This film is neither, unless you read against the grain, and I guess you could — those long shots of people fucking doggie style in their windows are pretty funny —

— as is main character Brandon’s bathetic emotional breakdown in the rain on the end of a pier —

— or if you think McQueen is pulling off a series of Brechtian jokes à la Kubrick. (Ironically is the only plausible way you should take anything this movie presents.) Stylistically, there are some similarities with Eyes Wide Shut. But the evidence for the latter isn’t very convincing, for me anyway, and I guess that means it’s not executed well, as it is in Michael Schleinzer’s Michael.

Instead, we get “sex addiction” (still not convinced it’s a real thing) as some sort of supranormal, non-contextualized malady of the soul. Once I saw this, I figured, well, he’s gonna have sex with a man finally, ’cause that’s usually the lowest a straight guy can go in movies like these. And he did! But I was wrong in part — the lowest he could go was having a three-way with two fake lesbians and making silly o-faces at himself in the mirror.

Shame (should’ve been called Shaming? Or Crying Shame?) is full of very predictable, perfectly male-heterosexual, perfectly dumb ideas about sex. I think its singular achievement is managing to convey so little commitment to the guilt its main character is supposedly feeling or supposed to be feeling. I have no idea what McQueen wanted the audience to feel. That’s what they mean by cold, I guess, or what so many gullible critics call an “art film”. It’s impeccably shot, though, and Fassbender is as good as he could possibly be. And as hung.

film note: Blind Faith

I went into this late 90s Showtime original movie cold. I’m not even sure what made me give it a try among the hundreds of films that catch my attention. It might have been my interest in seeing a feature film by Ernest Dickerson whose direction I’d admired in several TV series, including the Wire, The Walking Dead, Dexter, and most recently for HBO’s wonderful New-Orleans set Treme. Dickerson was also the cinematographer for several Spike Lee movies, notably Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X. But I was blindsided by the emotional impact of this powerful melodrama which is part courtroom procedural and part family drama.

Set principally in the Bronx, c. 1957, the film details the trial of 18-year-old Charlie Williams, who at the beginning of the movie, under mysterious and vague circumstances that don’t become clear until much later, kills an Irish boy in a park near his home. His uncle John, a criminal lawyer, ends up defending him. I was taken by surprise not only by the secrets revealed in the plot and what they say about social standards, racial tensions, black family dynamics and gender, but in the commitment to shooting and acting styles straight out of its period. There are parts of Blind Faith that reminded me of I Want To Live!, from 1958, and many of the prison and police station scenes are shot like noir. In fact, the film probably should have been in black and white.

Despite its power, the film has flaws, mostly in the performances. Only Charles Dutton, as Charles Williams, Charlie’s cop-father, has the chops and gravitas to put over his character, and the supporting cast is sometimes left blubbering or balling or blustering unconvincingly. Nevertheless, there are two harrowing back-to-back scenes that alone are worth watching the whole film for: When young Charlie finally confesses what really happened that night in the park, and when his father finally finds out. It’s hair-raising.

It’s a real shame that this film isn’t available on DVD but you can find it in the usual places as a VHS rip. Or watch it on YouTube.